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Big Ears Festival Stars the Avant-Garde

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Big Ears in Knoxville, Tenn.

Big Ears in Knoxville, Tenn.

CreditJake Giles Netter for The New York Times

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The avant-garde is a notion shaped by discomfort, as well as defiance. No music gets that designation unless it makes people feel uneasy or threatened. Tanya Tagaq, a singer from Nunavut, the northernmost territory in Canada, gave an exemplary lesson in assuaging worry here on Saturday afternoon at Big Ears, an ambitious three-day festival of experimental music in a place without much of a history of nurturing it.

Three musicians took the stage at the Bijou Theater — Ms. Tagaq, the violinist Jesse Zubot and the drummer Jean Martin — to perform Ms. Tagaq’s adaptation of Inuit throat singing. Traditionally practiced by two women singing face to face, throat singing was banned by Christian clergy in the territory for most of the 20th century, she said, because “the colonists couldn’t take that much awesomeness.” Her method is to suggest both sides of the guttural back-and-forth in one voice; it would be expressive, she warned — so much so that audiences often wonder if she is in pain.

She was doing her own version of what Big Ears has done in its four editions since 2009: assuring listeners that it is level, trustworthy, wise, acting on reason as well as passion, connected to a sense of culture and tradition, while putting fairly radical art before its audience. Ms. Tagaq did what she said. In an improvised set, she prowled the stage and transformed herself into multiple spirits, inhaling with cries and exhaling with grunts, implying R&B and rock singing, and reaching the extremes of her range and the end of her lung capacity.

Big Ears needs to appeal to audiences who, for about $150, will buy a weekend pass to the unknown. This year, that meant string-ensemble or orchestra works like Terry Riley’s “The Cusp of Magic,” making reference to Native American rituals and meditation, and Max Richter’s “Vivaldi Recomposed,” a version of minimalism even less threatening than Vivaldi. It also meant music with thudding electronic beats and chopped digital sounds, like Tyondai Braxton’s new composition-installation “HIVE,” for percussionists and laptops; improvisation, like Ms. Tagaq’s, or the Bad Plus’s jazz-trio rendering of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”; and around the edges, hypnotic rock or folk, like two magnificent (and aggressive) performances by the New York bands Zs and Swans, and one by the Chicago guitarist and singer Ryley Walker, whose jazz-fluent band built a coherent flow of sound.

The Big Ears aesthetic of openness wasn’t entirely original, or entirely open. It didn’t include much jazz, but highly valued the New York and California minimalism and post-minimalism aesthetic of the 1970s and ’80s. This is partly the story of Nonesuch Records; six artists from its past-and-future roster participated in this year’s festival, including the Kronos Quartet, which performed five times over the weekend alongside musicians like Terry Riley, Bryce Dessner, Laurie Anderson, Sam Amidon, Rhiannon Giddens, Nels Cline, Wu Man and Ms. Tagaq. And Big Ears also tapped into a hive of intellectually curious and festival-ready American rock and electronic and classical-ish musicians, many of whom were represented by the same company, the Windish Agency.

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Every efficient institution becomes centralized, but Big Ears sometimes leans on powerful external filters of taste to shape its personality. That’s something to beware; that’s how festivals become predictable.

Still, its insistence on the long and inclusive view, and its reluctance to make explicit connections for the listener, results in a positive confusion. What’s being sold is an impulse toward curiosity, not a particular style. The experiment has worked, so far: attendance rose to nearly 2,500 per day this year, up 40 percent from 2014, according to Ashley Capps, founder of AC Entertainment, the Knoxville-based concert producer that runs the event. Those aren’t rock numbers — Mr. Capps, who also helps produce Bonnaroo, understands that — but this isn’t a field festival. It takes place in downtown Knoxville, using two historic theaters, the city’s art museum and a few of its clubs — a short and manageable circuit. Excellent sound was a rule and audiences stayed attentive. (The only problem I saw involved the squeak of an opening-and-closing nightclub door versus the meditative quiet of the cellist and singer Hildur Gudnadottir’s set on Saturday at the Square Room, a space off Knoxville’s Market Square.)

In all the stylistic spread, themes do appear. Last year’s Big Ears had lots of electric guitars and looping. This year’s was quieter, with more emphasis on the voice and the breath: including Ms. Tagaq, Ms. Gudnadottir, the Southern-music historian Ms. Giddens, and Merrill Garbus of Tuneyards (“Bless my lungs, bless my lungs,” she belted in her song “Real Thing”). There were also more acoustic strings, whether guitars or cellos or banjos or Wu Man’s lute-like pipa, on which she played traditional Chinese music like a fingerpicking bluegrass shredder.

There were also persistent themes of decay, erasure, distance and unease, often in conjunction with mood-setting films. In separate but analogous performances, Laurie Anderson (in “Landfall,” her piece with Kronos about Hurricane Sandy) and the young composer and singer Holly Herndon used plain vocal tones through digital technology to comment on memory, disorientation, and the Internet. Liz Harris, the singer-songwriter who performs as Grouper, played a set of sensuous, disembodied melancholy: strummed patterns and stacked vocal harmonies dissolving into fields of gorgeous delay and reverb, with two 16-millimeter films showing in close up patterns in wood and water and stone. She sat in darkness, at the rear of the stage — the perfect opposite of Ms. Tagaq’s way of doing things — and left as soon as the film ended; she gave no warnings or thanks to the audience, only sound and ideas.

A version of this article appears in print on March 31, 2015, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Festival and a Potpourri, Big Ears Lets the Curious Decide. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe